This Lamentable City: Poems of Polina Barskova

by Polina Barskova

Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the Russian by Ilya Kaminsky. Polina Barskova's poems are a zesty paradoxical concoction: bawdy and erudite, elegant and raw, subtle and brazen. As Ilya Kaminsky attests in his introduction to THIS LAMENTABLE CITY, "Barskova is an elegiac poet who brings to her American readers a language formally inventive, worldly and humorous. One of her strengths is her ability to bring together strikingly erotic, sensual images...with a deep sense of history and culture.... In Russian, Barskova is a master of meter, rhyme, and alliteration, and...(w)hat comes across in English is the tonality of the poems, the clarity of her vocal play and images, her intricacy of address." Though her prize-winning books of poetry in Russian have earned an international reputation, and individual poems have appeared in prestigious journals and anthologies--for instance, in Contemporary Russian Poetry (Dalkey Archive, 2008) and An Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets (Iowa, 2005)--this is the first book of Barskova's poems to be published in translation, in a handsome dual-language edition.

Contents:
To A.K. --
Motherhood and childhood --
Manuscript found by Natasha Rostova during the fire of Moscow --
When someone dies --
from "The discourse on the demise of Russian literature" --
From Mad Vatslav's diary --
Evening in Tsarskoe Selo --
Summer physiological essay: wanderers --
Moscow --
Conjunction, and --
A still life.

Genres: Poetry

33 pages, Paperback

First published March 22, 2010

About the author

Polina Barskova is an associate professor of Russian Literature at Hampshire College. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of twelve collections of poetry in Russian, including her latest volume of selected poems Solnechnoe utro na ploshchadi (A Sunny Morning on the Square, 2018), and author of a collection of short stories entitled Zhiviye kartiny (Living Pictures, 2014), for which she was awarded the Andrei Belyi Prize (2015). Three collections of her poetry have appeared in English translation: This Lamentable City (2010), Zoo in Winter (2011) and Relocations (2013). She edited the anthology Written In The Dark, named Best Literary Translation into English for 2017 by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and Eastern European Languages, and of two scholarly works in Russian: a reader on the Siege of Leningrad Blokada: svidetel’stva o leningradskoi blokade (2017) and a collection of conference papers Blokadnye narrativy (2017). Her first English monograph, Besieged Leningrad: Aesthetic Responses to Urban Disaster, was published in 2017.

Reviews

[Naomi · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was expecting so much more from a book translated by Ilya Kaminsky. There were a few poems I really found moving, but overall, the book left me flat. And all those images of licking! I felt like I should take a bath!

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

super short and kind of perfect. a little dark but also full of life. i read it aloud.

[Arnoldo Garcia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Snap-review of "This Lamentable City: poems by Polina Barskova"

Because at one time I believed that the capitalist society I lived in could be transformed with deep justice, self-less revolutionary organizing, I looked to other countries that had overthrown this system and looked to their poets to see how they saw and wrote about the the transformations and their attempts at revolutionary transformations. There was much to immerse myself in Spanish:
Cuban, Salvadoran, Nicaraguan, Spanish, Portuguese, Argentinian, Chilean, Bolivian, Mexican, Ecuadorian, Columbian and other spanish-speaking lands.

There were many more poets also striking at the social and economic structures of oppression and liberation with new language, desired consciousness and cultural tanks of organizing to read, thanks to bilingual translators:
Greek, French, Eastern Europe, the Philippines, Japanese, Chinese, India, multiple Indigenous poets -- some writing in English, too.

Poetry was a key link, poets the connectors of diverse realities, dreams and struggles.

After being introduced to Mayakovsky in the 1970s, I have always been intrigued by the digested Russian poetry brought to us by formidable translators, Herbert Marshall at the top of the icebreaker list. Mayakovsky's constellation-lines, his still alive viewings of dominant industrial society that purged nature from humans and vice versa and struggled to become human in spite of the inhumanity of the industrialized worlds, renewed my faith in meter, in rhyme, in desire and eros ("standing outside one's body). There are the Russian grandfather/grandmother poets: Velemir Khbelnikov, Marina Tsvetaeva, the myriad groups (Symbolists, Futurists, Acmeists, et. al.) who all lived and wrote trapped in the imagination of the experiment of transforming a country that believed it was socialist. All great social and political struggles and movements are accompanied by great poets and poetry; the tension always between poetic freedom and social compulsions, individualism and collectivizations, community and communes, voice and slogans.

Russian poetry (not alone) has since been caught up in that beautiful contradiction of linguistic and cultural innovation and industrialization, commercialization, neoliberalism, eastern/western-ization, destruction of Indigenous cultures and lands, multiplying attempts to define and envision as outcasts of the world according to capitalism.

So here joining these contradictions of development, nationality, language, gender, coercion, in the pleasures of experiencing the transitions from a bipolar to a unipolar world (that is the wetiko disease, what the Lakota concept for the illness of private property, a socially accepted bi-polar illness that has destroyed the natural world and humanity's place in her) is a small tome of poetry, "This Lamentable City" by Polina Barskova.

I immediately picked up and bought this 33 page book of poems because it was by a Russian poet. I wanted to understand how she plucked herself in the most 21st century of clumps of human settlements the city. I live in a city that was almost totally abandoned by private capital over a period of more than 35 years, Oakland - a truly lamentable city.

Poetry matters in my world. And my world includes every country, every land, every language, every poet who writes to understand her world, to influence her human surroundings and to transform and be transformed form the inside out in the relationships that unfold, blossom, and counter the lesser forces that want to drag us out of our poetic shells, stomp us, make us into clerks, data-shifters and put us in cubicle cells.

Polina Barskova puts herself out in this short poetry collection. She writes in the present tense, accompanying Nabakov's mother, a woman the heroine in Tolstoy's "War & Peace" big book, the grand Akmatova and her own personal desires that take the form of the daily tribulations of relationships. In a poem, one of whose lines provides the title to the collection, she contrasts the human spaces and bodies, the harsh realities she navigates:

Now you will forget what you desired. Now,
Who you were. Now, this lamentable city
Where we have lived together.
Are you still frightened, girl? Already
I am a bitter stranger.
("To A.K.")

The covers of the book declare that in Russia Barskova "is considered one of the most accomplished and wring of the younger poets." Like all poetry and poets that generate knowledge and culture in their work and words, Barskova does demand a deep knowledge of Russian poetry. Some of her insights, laughter, her eros, require prerequisite readings and traversing the contradictions of Russian- and non-Russian-ness. She provides many inputs and entry-points for anyone curious enough to want to get a taste of what is emerging in other parts of the world that is facing a similar nightmare and hope that we wield against the industrial-smokestack driven social-cultural formations created by capitalism. We share a past that provides direction and examples of how to be and not be,a s poets, as unordinary cultural workers and communty-based visionaries. Writing in the voice of the heroine in War & Peace," Barskova defends us against the official version of things, where the human "spirit" lives in everyone and everything:

...I will be a handful of smoke
Over this, lost, Moscow.

I will console any man,
I will sleep with any man,
Beneath the army's traveling horse carriages.

These are lines that I wish I would have written to take Última out of "Bless Me Última" and make Última anew, walk out of her own confinements, become a healing woman's bodily force, when we need healers and curanderas and human spirit to infuse the problems and the relationships that are threatening ourselves out in this conundrum of industrialized humanity. Turn back the pages, turn back to previous eras and eros, there is something there for us to reconsider, "This Lamentable City" implies. The small things are what counts and they build up. Her daughter appears in her poems to show the depths of culture and the simplicity of relationships, like a true city living in a family caught in the daily routines that change everything.

***
Socially just, poetically sustainable, eros-driven, transformations are possible and taking place. Sometimes just an island at a time, sometimes just a community and place at a time -- and our poets are there taking notes and making their own proposals, utopian and universal, or just writing love poems to their belovéds.

[Doug · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book Riot’s Read Harder Book Challenge 2017:
Task #23: Read a collection of poetry in translation on a theme other than love.

[mark mendoza · Rating 1 out of 5]

A publishing disaster. No hint of why this is important work, except that rich Americans were involved in getting it to their friends.

[JD · Rating 5 out of 5]

Barskova is one of the most talented poets alive. She's probably the most technical and innovative while still maintaining an air of classicality. This is my favorite thing she's put out, and I wish all of her work was translated. I don't really subscribe to the idea that translation sacrifices much, or at least nowhere near as much as some people might argue, but I don't doubt that a certain something is lost without being able to read these in Russian.

That said, even in English, these poems are haunting, beautiful, loose, and like nothing else I've ever read. Her work has only continued to improve, leaving behind much of the unnecessary experimentation with form, and honing on on what she does best: striking and unforgettable images. Like a more minimal, Russian Rilke.

One of a kind talent for sure.

[Rowan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was deeply impressed with this slight volume packed with sensual, visceral language that borders often on the grotesque. It is startling, rhythmically potent work that uses lines and enjambment to great effect, something I often find lacking in contemporary poetry both in original-language and in translation. Here, the English of the (collaborative) translation works carefully with rhythm and sound, but without drowning out the accent, those slips and strangenesses that indicate this is a work from a different context entirely. This is not naturalized or domesticated, not homogenized into the English standards of poetry. Incantatory, absorbing and very impressive.

[Virginia Baker · Rating 5 out of 5]

From "Conjunction, And"

...and you took me by the took me by the took me by the hand
and a tree with red berries and mountains and mountains
and we laughed and listened and Lord everything was bullshit
and the tree with its red berries and its bark and its bark
and we had each other like beasts without pausing
and if everything after the face is sad we are not things
and we came from garbage and we played with garbage
and you caressed my skin with the seeds of pearls.

From "Manuscript Found by Natasha Rostova During the Fire of Moscow"

I will try to live on earth without you
I will try to live on earth without you
I will become any object,
I don't care what -

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a good book, yes, but for all the incredibly high praise it's received I was expecting something a little more earth-shattering. Instead, it's a very very thin volume that mines history for its intrigue, and often it seems the appeal here for Americans would be a hint of international Cold War voyeurism, rather than much in the way of true empathy. It was fascinating, though, to see how the Russian was translated, but for those with no Russian that is lost; in short, these poems are lovely, but lead editor and translator Ilya Kaminsky writes better ones himself.

[Faith]

Excellent